Missed this, but to respond in general (if anyone's still reading): I guess monoculture wasn't quite what I had in mind. I remember somebody (Marcus?) said about Eminem that by making his first big single about him being controversial, before anyone even had a chance to call him controversial, he thrust himself into mass culture simply by assuming that he was already part of it. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about here. Not an actual monoculture (which, agreed, is a super-problematic conception that was more true in the 50s but even then there was black culture, gay culture, etc., all of which didn't necessarily interact much with mainstream culture) (in the US anyway) but an effort by pop to present itself as evidence of a monoculture by trying to appeal to a broad swath of people, whether or not it was true. It's almost impossible to tell whether there is a monoculture, but it's easy to see if an artist wants there to be. Dave's comment maybe gets at my intended point better. I see pop music right now as steadily declining in cultural influence, not because of anything it's doing or not doing (and I wouldn't say I'm worried about it necessarily) but because of certain historical/technological/whatever forces out of its control. What's lost in that is the bigness that draws me to pop and that has either been absent lately, or I'm just getting old (creak, crack). In other words, I think the consequence isn't just in how we interact with pop, but in how pop sounds.
Well, it wasn't you who used the term. Was "the rich girls are weeping" in the comments thread. Presumably "the rich girls" didn't coin the term.
Culture (whether mass or sub-) builds itself around controversies and problems, somewhat. So "togetherness" is never meant to be all-inclusive. One of the complexities of "popular culture" is that "challenge the mainstream" is a mainstream concept, so the mainstream is often full of people in search of something mainstream to oppose. Britney was the brat girl disrupting the school, Eminem was disrupting everything, incl. the little girl and boy groups that annoyed him.
It all depends on what one takes to be "cultural influence," but in my lifetime music's most obvious cultural influence comes when sounds seem to be bursting upon us. Which means the sounds are new, or at least seem to be. So, though music may be basic to a lot of people's day-to-day lives in the '00s, its influence (which means its power to shape or warp us) is unnoticed, since the sound of music and - therefore - its way of shaping us is relatively static hence unnoticed, as opposed to when music was warping everything 1964-68 in the fragmented Sixties, or the combined impacts of metal and punk and disco in the fragmented Seventies. Etc. Now in the fragmented '00s the various fragments don't seem to be nearly as much in motion (and I wonder why).
Yeah, in the comments some folks drew out the connection I sort of waved my hands at where TRL pitted metal/punk against pop against hip-hop, in a complicated sort of dance that still included it all. And then Blink-182 makes a video parodying boybands and Eminem takes shots at Xtina but they all still show up in Times Square and square off on the same stage, as it were, which gives this feeling of the whole thing as spectacle rather than as genuine conflict, a thing to locate yourself within rather than people you don't know arguing about things you don't care about. Maybe. As a teenager, of course, it all seemed very very very important.
which gives this feeling of the whole thing as spectacle rather than as genuine conflict
Something's being a spectacle doesn't mean that the conflicts aren't genuine (e.g., Repubs vs. Dems). I think one of the mistakes people make in thinking about culture is that they assume that sharing a culture means "having" values that the members of the culture all "share." Whereas I'd say crucial features of cultures and subcultures are what people in the cultures tend to fight about. So clashes between cultures and between subcultures will often take the form of people not comprehending each other's battles, so conflicts might be over what's worth fighting about.
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timeasmymeasure
general response
Date: 2008-11-18 11:35 pm (UTC)Re: general response
Date: 2008-11-18 11:44 pm (UTC)Re: general response
Date: 2008-11-19 06:40 am (UTC)Culture (whether mass or sub-) builds itself around controversies and problems, somewhat. So "togetherness" is never meant to be all-inclusive. One of the complexities of "popular culture" is that "challenge the mainstream" is a mainstream concept, so the mainstream is often full of people in search of something mainstream to oppose. Britney was the brat girl disrupting the school, Eminem was disrupting everything, incl. the little girl and boy groups that annoyed him.
It all depends on what one takes to be "cultural influence," but in my lifetime music's most obvious cultural influence comes when sounds seem to be bursting upon us. Which means the sounds are new, or at least seem to be. So, though music may be basic to a lot of people's day-to-day lives in the '00s, its influence (which means its power to shape or warp us) is unnoticed, since the sound of music and - therefore - its way of shaping us is relatively static hence unnoticed, as opposed to when music was warping everything 1964-68 in the fragmented Sixties, or the combined impacts of metal and punk and disco in the fragmented Seventies. Etc. Now in the fragmented '00s the various fragments don't seem to be nearly as much in motion (and I wonder why).
Re: general response
Date: 2008-11-19 07:35 am (UTC)Re: general response
Date: 2008-11-19 03:03 pm (UTC)Something's being a spectacle doesn't mean that the conflicts aren't genuine (e.g., Repubs vs. Dems). I think one of the mistakes people make in thinking about culture is that they assume that sharing a culture means "having" values that the members of the culture all "share." Whereas I'd say crucial features of cultures and subcultures are what people in the cultures tend to fight about. So clashes between cultures and between subcultures will often take the form of people not comprehending each other's battles, so conflicts might be over what's worth fighting about.